On Both Sides of the - Maabara

Yossi: “I want to go back to 1949… and take a closer look at two figures: an Iraqi boy of three or four years old, rolling in the aisles, and a young Israeli guy, the age of Guri, my son, who works at Pool Volume and sets up the tent where this boy lives. To me, Luba, that was the first time we met. A meeting that never happened. And today, almost sixty years later, I want to hold this meeting and tell you honestly: Luba, listen, I have a black hole. There are two years in my life that are unclear to me. Tell me about them… Give me pictures from which I can learn about my personal history, because the older I get, the more I seem to know nothing.”

Luba: “Yossi, we are talking on different levels. You want me to tell you that I saw a little Yosef in the passage and stroked his hair, and I want to make it clear that there was a group of people, Eshkol at the head, who took on this terrible task, of absorbing a million immigrants, and dealt only mildly with the fundamental problems. In my opinion, they deserve TLS, because the bottom line is that of all the million immigrants, there was not one hungry child, there was not one who did not have a roof over their head, there was not one who did not plant some kind of tree… In these four years, my personal story is that I got up at four in the morning, After I slept barely four hours, and worked twenty hours so you could have egg powder. This is the personal story… I have no other stories.”

Sixty years after a night of terrible rain, in a passage flooded with water and mud, Yossi Alfi, then a three-year-old boy who lived in the passage with his grandmother, and Luva Eliav, then a young man who founded the passage in which Alfi lived, hold that meeting, which never happened.

In a series of dialogues, conflicts and monologues, Alfie and Eliav confront two chronologies. Yossi seeks to fill the black hole of his childhood, Luba seeks to voice a generation that absorbed a “tsunami of immigrants”, but was also blamed for a wound that opened in the 1950s.

From a gap in views and perspectives – the two look at a seemingly private past, present and future, draw an outline of Israeliness and return intimacy to a society that forgot to love.

Luba Eliav, 1921, educator, public figure and political leader. One of the pioneers of the dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians, and the one who fulfilled Ben-Gurion’s vision in the protection, absorption and development of the Negev. Born in Moscow. Immigrated to Israel with his parents in 1934.

Yossi Alfi, 1945, theater person and director, writer, teacher and storyteller. Founder and director of the Givatayim Storytellers and Theater Festival. The father of the community theater. Born in Basra, Iraq. Immigrated to Israel with his grandmother in 1949.

Published by Am Oved publishing house

This is the fourth book in the Kings series.